1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer software and voice mail systems used in telephone communications and more particularly to an apparatus and method for storing, retrieving, and transmitting facsimiles.
2. Description of the Background Art
A recent advance in business telephone communications has been the addition of voice mail systems to business telephone systems. A voice mail system can answer incoming telephone calls, record incoming telephone messages, and direct such messages to the appropriate mailboxes. Users can review messages at their convenience. Voice mail also allows users to prepare messages, to store messages, and to send identical messages to multiple destinations at different times. A user may store a message for later transmission or for transmission with other messages. Voice mail is a general voice message manager and has become a standard feature of business offices.
Also of increasing importance to businesses is the facsimile machine. Facsimile machines transmit documents, also known as faxes, over telephone lines to a receiving facsimile machine. A facsimile machine can both send and receive faxes. When a facsimile machine transmits a fax, it dials the telephone number of the destination facsimile machine, establishes a telephone line, transmits the fax, and disconnects the telephone line. The facsimile machine performs these steps for each fax that it transmits. When a facsimile machine receives a fax, it prints the fax simultaneously with its reception. The facsimile machine generally has only limited memory to store faxes.
The increased use of facsimile machines raises issues of privacy and confidentiality. In most businesses a small number of facsimile machines serve a large number of employees. Unless the recipient of the fax has a personal facsimile machine to which no other person has access, the intended recipient's incoming faxes will not be private. Furthermore, if the recipient is not at the location of the receiving facsimile machine, the faxes are not available until the faxes are picked up or delivered.
One drawback of storing and sending faxes from a voice mail system to a facsimile machine is the inefficiencies associated with connecting to a phone line, transmitting the fax, and disconnecting from the facsimile machine, each time a fax is to be printed. What is needed is a voice mail system which could take all faxes to be printed, batch them together, and print them during one telephone call. By batching faxes together, the voice mail system would eliminate having to dial the telephone number of the receiving facsimile machine and establish a telephone line to the receiving facsimile machine for each fax. The voice mail system would only have to dial the telephone number and establish the telephone line once.